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museums



  • Museum Celebrates Sweet Smell of... Failure

    The Museum of Failure is a global traveling exhibition that celebrates the signal marketplace flops of capitalism, from the infamous Edsel and New Coke to the obscure, highlighting the vagaries of consumer taste and historical contingency. 



  • Can Colonial Williamsburg Do Living History Better?

    Historian Karin Wulf argues that the leadership of Colonial Williamsburg has steered an effective course through the conflicting imperatives of nostalgia, heroic storytelling, and the harsh inequalities of the colonial era.   



  • The Victims of Communism Museum is a Propaganda Machine for Normalizing the Hard Right

    by Billie Anania

    The museum, which counts numerous Nazi sympathizers among its founders, peddles a spurious notion of "double genocide" that lets fascists off the hook by promoting the number of 100 million victims of communism. How do they get that tally? Including every German soldier killed on the eastern front and every victim of COVID-19. 



  • Exhibiting the Black Panthers' Ephemera

    An exhibition of the radical group's posters illustrates the importance-and difficulty-of documenting political movements that used visual communications through ephemeral media like postering and newspapers. 



  • The Cultural Workers Go On Strike

    A "black turtleneck uprising" of museum workers and adjunct professors tells us that brain work has become gig work, challenging cherished myths about education, opportunity and meritocracy. 



  • New York Museums to Disclose Provenance of Pieces Looted by Nazis

    The Metropolitan Museum has currently identified 53 works as seized or sold under duress by Nazis. It is unclear how many more it will identify in response to a new state law requiring the display of those pieces to disclose the conditions of acquisition. 

  • How We Told the Ongoing Story of Title IX

    by Laura Mogulescu

    A curator and her team chose to center the work of activists who pushed to determine the scope and meaning of Title IX's prohibition on sex discrimination in education throughout the law's 50-year history. Their exhibit is now open at the New-York Historical Society.



  • Previewing Tulsa's New Bob Dylan Center

    by Douglas Brinkley

    "The center—a high-tech vessel holding the man’s oeuvre and an overview of the man—will be the spiritual home of Dylan, a relentless performer who is forever on the road."



  • Smithsonian to Return All Benin Bronzes

    The Smithsonian will return works that it has legal title to own but that are linked to an infamous British raid on Benin City in 1897.


  • The Power and Urgency of Public History

    by David M. Chamberlain

    After a tour of the South's historical sites, I maintain a teacher’s optimism that knowledge of our nation’s imperfect past offers us the necessary wisdom to walk ourselves back from the edge of the political ledge on which we are so perilously perched.